Thick blood for thick footballers? Why it all went so wrong?

[shell on wheels]

Has anyone seen this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today...00/8771297.stm

This sounds a bit woo woo and silly, was wondering if anyone had an opinion or knowledge of this?

[DAS]

It could simply be that England were crap!

I would have thought that his theory might have some validity if we trained at altitude but played at sea level, but we played at altidude as well and were still dismal.

[smudge]

My understanding is that training at altitude gives a positive fitness result (due to increased red blood cell count) for about ten days after returning to sea level. This is why cyclists have been known to bottle their own blood at altitude and have a transfusion at a later date during Tour De France!
I'm unsure how this could be translated into a negative effect for England as the link suggests.
I suspect DAS's analysis is correct!

[tolman]

Being at really high altitude can cause problems - one of the the body's responses is to produce more red blood cells, but qt extreme altitude, that can get to a counterproductive level.

I remember reading about someone doing work on Everest where they removed blood from some people and found their exercise performance improved, supposedly due to having less-viscous blood.

I suppose there are various possible confounding factors (state of hydration, other changes to blood chemistry as a result of removing X amount of plasma, etc) but I'd assume the study tried to correct for those.

However, I wasn't aware of much in the way of bad effects for people training at reasonable altitudes, such as up to 2000m or so, and I'd have thought that there had been enough work done on altitude training for athletes (and presumably also for the military) that there'd be a pretty good idea of suitable training regimes.

[panama]

Without going and checking this up, I seem to recall that training/living at altitude has been put forward as an explanation for certain countries' dominance at long distance running.

Can't see it as a negative...anyway how long were they there? Not enough time to fully acclimatise I would have thought.